Externalizing Patterns for Simulations in Software Engineering of Systems-of-Systems

Systems-of-Systems (SoS) often support critical domains. They must be trustworthy, i.e., they must keep their operation in progress, being not subject to failures, as they can cause potential damages and hazards to human integrity. Simulations are a recurrent approach in SoS development, as they can anticipate potential failures, consequently increasing the level of trustworthiness and quality exhibited by a SoS. Nevertheless, simulation is still software and demands engineering. Moreover, many simulation formalisms are not trivial of specifying, sometimes tangling software an hardware details to program an executable simulation. Thus, the aim of this paper is contributing for software engineering of SoS by externalizing two patterns for the conception of SoS simulations. We evaluated our patterns by applying them in a case study in two different domains. For both, patterns were successfully applied during automatic generation of functional code, supporting the execution of SoS simulations and prediction of SoS behavior at design-time.